 $1,060, $424, and $0. What do all of those numbers have in common? Well, in this video, I'm gonna be explaining that, plus I'm gonna break down four of our six-year contracts in the Air Force. So if you're joining the Air Force soon, it's a good thing you're watching this video because I'm gonna help you decide is the four-year or the six-year contract better for your situation. If you appreciate this video, be sure to give it a thumbs up. Now I'm gonna assume that most of you guys watching this video are joining the Air Force. Well, if you are joining the Air Force, then you definitely need to know about Sandbox, which is the sponsor of today's video. Friends and family can send you a letter from literally anywhere. All they have to do is use the Sandbox app or use the website online, type up their letter and hit send. Your loved one will get tracking. It will include the message that they wrote, a photo if they choose to include one, a piece of paper for you to write a message back, and it also includes a pre-addressed envelope. Nobody likes writing all the addresses on letters, like that is, nobody likes it. Thankfully Sandbox eliminates that. All you have to do is add a stamp to that letter and mail it back to your loved one and they get tracking for your letter back to them. That was literally my favorite thing about Sandbox was being able to know when a letter from McKenna was going to arrive in my mailbox. So if you haven't told your friends or family about Sandbox before you leave for basic training, you need to get on that. Be sure to use the link in the description below. All right, now let's get back to the video. Now the first obvious difference between a four and a six-year contract is that you're gonna be under contract for an additional two years with the six-year contract. Now, overall, when you first join the military, you're technically signing an eight-year contract. Here's the simple version of this. After you serve your four or six years, like you initially signed, that eight-year contract actually puts you into the individual ready reserves, which is a unit that you don't really do anything. Like you're not paid, you don't have to report, you don't have to do PT tests. But the whole reason for the IRR or the individual ready reserves is so if the military needed to do a draft, the United States wouldn't have to draft untrained personnel. We would be able to go to the individual ready reserves and go, hey, you guys already did your job for four or six years. And you might have been out of the military for a year or two years by now. But we need to bulk up our military. You're technically still under contract. So we're gonna pull you back into the military. This almost never happens. Like it is super rare. But on our website, airmanvision.com, I actually wrote a blog post that explains four versus six-year contracts. And I went into more depth about all the different factors and everything to help you make a better decision. So be sure to check out the blog post on airmanvision.com after this video. In my opinion, there are four factors of why people choose a four or six-year contract. And those four factors are money, experience, ego, retirement. Now personally, I think ego weighs the highest on most people's decisions. And they wanna sign a six-year contract. They think that if I sign a six-year contract, I'm better than those that sign up for. You are really gone for real. Because the rest of this video and on the website, I explain why signing a six-year contract might not be the best option for most people. Literally the biggest reason why most people sign a six-year contract is entirely because of ego. They think that they're gonna be ahead. They're gonna have more opportunities. They're gonna make more money. They're gonna have more power. And none of that is true. Like there's literally the farthest thing from the truth. Yes, you make more money. Do you have more power? No, do you have more responsibilities? No, when you show up as a brand new airman, it doesn't matter if you're an E1 or an E3, a brand new airman is gonna get treated like a brand new airman. So that ego boost doesn't even last very long because once you hit operational at your first duty station, most of us looked around and were like, you realize that you are gonna be envious of the guy that signed a four-year contract two years from now. Because both of you are gonna be like, I don't know if I wanna stay in or get out, but you're gonna have four years left and that guy's gonna have two years left. And he can start setting up his life if he wants to get out. And you're gonna be sitting here going, man, I wanna get out, but I still got four years, three years, two, like, it's a long, long wait. If you're waiting to get out and you signed a six-year contract. So that's why signing a four-year contract really isn't that bad of a thing. Now, I wouldn't say a lot of people that joined the military at first are focused on retirement because a lot of times they're under the age of 20 or 21. They don't really have a whole lot of life experience and they're really just focused on in the moment and what they want right now. Now, if you're new to the channel or you just happen to miss it, we've posted several videos on the military TSP, which is the 401K of the military in the retirement system and how that works. So be sure to check out those videos as well. But when considering retirement, a lot of people think, oh, I'm gonna sign six years because that gets me closer to my 20-year retirement. Yes, that's true. It still gets you those extra two years for somebody that signs a four-year. But both of you guys are gonna be given the option to re-enlist as long as you stay out of trouble and don't do anything wrong. Realistically, it's not actually helping you get closer to retirement. And that pushes me into the money factor. You might make more money signing a four-year contract and that sounds contradictory, but here's why I say that. When you sign a four-year contract, you can re-enlist at your four-year mark. If your job offers a re-enlistment bonus, you can get that re-enlistment bonus two years before somebody that signed a six-year contract. Now, not all jobs offer re-enlistment bonuses and the re-enlistment bonuses differ between different jobs. Every year, the Air Force assesses manning and they shift how they wanna do the bonuses to try to keep certain people in certain jobs or entice people to wanna re-enlist and stay in long term. So even if you sign a four-year contract, it's not guaranteed that you're gonna be able to get a re-enlistment bonus anyways. And there are some people that I've known that never got a re-enlistment bonus their whole career. Somebody else, same job, got a re-enlistment bonus every time they re-enlisted because they re-enlisted one or two years apart from each other. One always was given the opportunity for a re-enlistment bonus. And then when this guy was up, they didn't have the re-enlistment bonus anymore. You can't forecast or predict that. So the biggest factor with money is I'm gonna get paid more money if I sign the six-year because I'm gonna get early promotion, which is true. If you sign a six-year contract and you're coming in as an E1 or an E2, you can be early promoted to E3 at the completion of tech school or after a set number of months if you have a longer tech school. And people look at that and say, hey, if I'm a higher rank, then I'm gonna get paid a lot more money. You're going to make more money in the beginning if you sign a six-year contract. Now the numbers that I mentioned at the beginning of this video, $1,060, $424, and $0. What those numbers have in common is for an E1, an E2, and an E3 if they signed a four or six-year contract. So if you had somebody join as an E1 for four years and an E1 for six years, after that four-year mark, you guys would be the same rank. You guys would both be senior airmen. And I calculated out the normal way that you would promote. And that's actually in a spreadsheet on the blog post on airmanvision.com for this topic. So if you wanna go check it out, you can see how much money you're gonna make every single month for your base pay. If you signed as an E1 four or six years, the six-year enlistee at four years is gonna have made $1,060 more. If you joined as an E2 in that same scenario, the person that signed six years, by the time you hit four years, the end of your four-year mark, when the other person gets to choose whether they get out or they stay in, the six-year enlistee will have only made $424 more. And then if you join as an E3, there's literally no benefit to signing a four or six-year contract. It's all the same. Just the four-year lets you make a decision sooner on whether you wanna stay in or get out or re-enlist or whatever. Now something that I'm not factoring into this is, what if I join as an E1 versus joining as an E2? Well, the thing is, is that's based on your accomplishments so far in life. Like if you have so many college credits, that determines whether you can join as an E1, E2 or E3. So just for fun, I made up this fake scenario of what if you were going to join and sign a four-year contract as an E1, but instead you're like, no. I'm gonna pay for myself to go to college and then I'm gonna join the Air Force as an E2. How much money would I make in that situation? The problem with this scenario is, one, you're gonna have to take a year or two off from wanting to join the military. You don't know what could happen at that time. You could have issues, you could break bones, you could get surgery, you could have illness, and then that prevents you from being able to join the military, which if you would have joined the military initially and then you got those ailments, the military would take care of you and it would be paid for. If you wanna join, I don't think it's smart to put it off to go to school unless you're trying to get a bachelor's degree, do JROTC, become an officer. That is the only situation that's gonna be beneficial to do college before you join. Now, if you're trying to go enlisted though, no benefit, like zero. It does not make any sense to put off joining the military to go to school. The difference between joining as an E1 and signing a four-year contract and say going to school and getting a year under your belt so you can join as an E2 because you wanna be higher rank and then you sign a six-year contract, you're gonna make an additional $2,392 if you put off joining the Air Force. But you also had to pay for college and pay for a place to live and pay for food that the military would have given to you for free, including college. And like I mentioned earlier at your four-year mark, it doesn't matter what contract you sign, you're all going to be an E4. The only benefit to signing a six-year contract is that immediate ego boost of I'm a higher rank than you right out of tech school. I make more money than you right out of tech school. If you join as an E1 and you sign a four-six-year contract, it doesn't matter because 16 months into your contract, you guys will be the same rank making the same pay. For 10 months, you got paid more money. And we're talking like $100 a month, if that. But long-term, I've seen the four-year contract benefit a lot more people than the extra $1,060 benefited anyone. Now the experience factor is not something that most people decide on what contract they're trying to sign. And honestly, it's the most important factor in what contract you sign. And the reason I'm saying experience matters is because you need to know what you want to do after the Air Force. There will be a after the Air Force time for you. So whether you retire or not, you need to be thinking about what are you going to do after the military? Now it's okay to not know exactly what you're going to do after the military. That's totally fine. There's a lot of people that are in that situation. But what you need to do is set yourself up to do both, set yourself up to stay in or get out. Then it turns into what opportunity is best for me in this moment and you take that. So the experience factor really matters when you actually have some idea of what you want to do after the military. There's some jobs that require five years of experience. There's some jobs that require four years of experience. Some require six. So two years ago I actually worked a contracting job in Alabama for a year and they required six years of experience. Well, I had six years of aircraft structural maintenance experience in the Air Force. So when I applied for that job, they accepted me because they really wanted people with experience. And if I would have signed a four-year contract, I maybe still would have been able to apply for that job and possibly get hired, but they probably would have been a lot more strict in the hiring process and the interview process. The big factor is some jobs do require four, five or six years of experience. If a job that you really, really want requires four years of experience, there's no point in signing a six year. Because you're just doing an extra two years in a job that you could have then been a civilian and possibly made a lot more money because you will make more money as a civilian, typically outside of the military. If you get the skills the military teaches you, you can transfer that and make more money. And that's why I don't factor in with the four versus six year contract. I don't factor in those additional two years that the six year enlistee gets because the four year enlistee, if they choose to get out, they're gonna get a job. So they're both gonna be getting paid but typically in that situation, the four year enlistee is actually gonna make more money as a civilian, even if they do the same exact job. And that's why I say set yourself up to stay in or get out because if you do have a job opportunity that pays a lot better on the outside, it might be better for you or your family to take that opportunity and then work your way up at that company and you'll have a higher ceiling of income than you would if you stayed in the military. The only factor that matters that weighs towards signing a six year contract would be the experience requirement of the job that you want as a civilian. How many years of experience does it require? If it requires six years or five years of experience, then signing a six year contract makes sense. And if you're doing it for the money or the promotion or anything like that, it's not that big of a benefit and you're still gonna be treated like a brand new airman. It doesn't matter what your rank is as a brand new airman because you're both showing up to a base with zero experience in operational air force and you're gonna be treated like that. It doesn't matter if you outrank somebody by two ranks or one rank, a brand new airman will be treated like you don't know anything and you will be expected to both take out the trash. And at your 16 month mark, you guys are gonna be the same rank anyways, and that's about the time that people are gonna start to go, hey, you've been at this base for a year. You kind of know what you're doing now. So in my personal opinion, until the Air Force decides to really step up the bonuses for signing a six year contract, I don't think that it's worth it to sign a six year contract unless the job you're looking for after the Air Force requires six years of experience or five years of experience because the Air Force doesn't offer a five year contract. Now I just said that the six year contract is not worth it in my opinion. So what would it take for it to be worth it? Because remember, if you sign a six year contract, you're locked in for two more years than somebody who signs a four year contract. If somebody does a four year contract, gets out, goes civilian, starts making more money than the person that signed six years, right? What's that money difference, that financial difference that that person can make in those last two years of the six year contract? I think somebody going as a civilian could possibly make 10 or $15,000 more a year than somebody that signed the six year contract. So in order to make it worth it, you're looking at a $20,000 or $30,000 sign on bonus if you just sign a six year contract, which I personally don't think that the military is going to do for typical normal jobs. Personally, not worth it to sign a six year contract. Now if you really do at the end of the day wanna sign a six year contract, you have to do whatever helps you sleep at night. I'm not gonna bash you if you sign a six year contract. I signed a six year contract. At the end of the day, you have to do what you need to do in that moment. Just make sure that you're making an educated decision. You've really thought things through. You know why you're signing a four or six year contract and you do what's best for you and your family. I hope you guys appreciated this video. If you did, be sure to give it a thumbs up and I will see you guys in another video.